This week in moments of respite from the endless toil of grading
papers I'm reading: Minima Moralia,The Moral Collapse of
the University, and Das Bild-Wörterbuch (pictures!),
and listening to a stack of CDs splurged on: Nico's Chelsea Girl,
four Muddy Waters records (Hard Again,I'm Ready,Real
Folk Blues, and More Real Folk Blues), Keren Ann's Not
Going Anywhere, and the Soft Pink Truth's hardcore covers album.
With more in the stack yet!

Grading will never stop, ever, as long as I teach. But at least
it's not torture anymore (maybe that was just a remnant of the
depression?); it's just that it inevitably results in tedium.

It seems as if writing in fragments (such a poorly chosen word,
thoughtlessly chosen), remarks, could be seen to make a work of thought
more forceful than if it had been written in continuous prose, as a
single line of argument; there is less exposure, greater intensity
throughout. The parts do not depend nearly so much on one another for
their correctness, validity, or significance; if one fails, or fails
to take hold, it might possibly hardly be missed. (The relation between
fragmentary - augh! - texts and networks is probably deeper than the
glibness of that formulation implies.) And when this is so, it seems,
somehow (I'm recording my impulses, hunches, here; regarded
soberly the situation feels like it can be brought exactly into line
in every way with that of continuously argued prose, by someone so
inclined to argue), as if each remark gets to say more because it
is allowed to presume so many other things have been said so securely.

What is it?
What is it like?
What does it sound like?
Why am I listening to it?
Should I listen to it?
Should I keep listening to it?
Why do I keep listening to it?
Will I keep listening to it?
Why do I want to listen to it?

Each separate section - it looks as if they're meant to seem like separate
entries not consistently dated, so that most are set apart only by the
blank space - of Rilke's Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge begins,
in the 1964 Norton edition of Norton's translation (no relation?), with
a drop cap.

It rather detracts from the conceit that the thing is made up of
Malte's notebook entries.